Dragon War Complex 11: Apocalypse
by Mike Steele
Summary: Following the departure of Goku and the dragon balls, a new era of peace settles upon the Earth. This era, however, will be dead before dawn, and a nightmare will replace it as the ruler of the world.
1. Prologue: Cleave

**Dragon War**  
Complex 11: _Apocalypse_  
Prologue: _Cleave_

To say that all was right with the world always had been to promulgate falsehood, but the most recent clump of decades had done more to disprove such assertions than any other period in Earth's history; to say that all was right with the world during this time had been to label the sky a meaty soup, to liken a mountain to a socket wrench, or to enumerate the nutritional values of fire.

Yesterday had been an era of legendary clashes between parties both demonic and angelic, an outright war between the Knights of Evil and the Knights of Good; the Knights of Evil had been known to frequently suspend the whole universe very perilously over a gaping, growling chasm that plunged straight down into the most unpleasant abyss in the darkest void of the realm of utter doom, and the Knights of Good had been known to keep that chasm from ever having a hearty meal.

During that chaotic time, all had certainly been very, very, very wrong with the world; the era of legendary clashes had been ripe well beyond the point of rancor with episodic despair and apocalyptic onslaughts.

The towering enormity of the peril that had ravaged the world with such phenomenal endurance, however, simply could not augment itself to any higher degree, and had it thus found itself wholly unable to match the rocketing achievements of those who would oppose it; the most heinously malicious forge of consumptive scourges could no longer contrive feats to trump its own carnage-spewing pawns or the benevolent forces that would topple those pawns, and it therefore found itself to be an obsolete relict.

The era of legendary clashes had thus taken its final bow and honorably departed from the smoldering universe, and this allowed a new age of endless potential to cascade thunderously in through the breaches in existence itself that the retired era had feverishly torn agape in its epic twilight; hope, maddened with joy, was cavorting about wildly, and this was a good thing.

To say that all was right with the world was now a blatant disservice to the splendor frolicking in every pore of the cosmos; wickedness itself gave the carcass of yesterday a loathsome kick in the side and then proceeded to skip pleasantly away into nothingness while whistling a giddy tune and smiling at the streams of splendor splashing underfoot.

There was, however, a titanic price for this new harmony, and that price was for both those who had fanned and those who had starved the wretched flames of cataclysm—both those who had brought to birth and those who had brought to extinction the era of legendary clashes—to be eternally without that which was most cherished: the Knights of evil were to be forever without the starry globes that had been at the heart of the whole war, and the Knights of Good were to be forever without the valiant heart that had employed those starry globes to win the whole war.


	2. Part 1, Chapter 1: Shattered Sons

**Dragon War**  
Complex 11: _Apocalypse_  
Part 01: _Nightmare's Reign_  
Chapter 01: _Shattered Sons_

"Pan, what are you doing?" asked Videl, curious as to what had distracted her daughter from bringing forth a raging volcano of snarling fire in which helpless marshmallows could be systematically sacrificed to the Great Belly Gods.

"Oh, just looking at the lake," Pan replied absent-mindedly. The dazzling splendor of the majestic scene had the majority of her attention thoroughly occupied, so she didn't fully realize that her mother had emerged from the tent and made an attempt to communicate with her.

"Oh? Well, I think I'll come look with you," Videl mumbled. She knew that Pan wasn't listening, that only the little creatures of the night were minding her—and they were only minding her out of fear or out of hunger. Videl, however, didn't want to be alone in the woods in the middle of the night. She didn't fear the dark or the outdoors anymore than nature mandated, and she was usually quite comfortable casually strolling about in the middle of the night, which she often did when Gohan started garbling out globs of contrivances in his sleep, but she still wasn't keen on being by herself at the moment.

Videl was lonely this evening, more than a bit depressed, and ferociously bent on spending quality time with her beloved daughter. Also, she felt uncomfortable, perhaps a bit vulnerable, but she suspected that the whole world felt that way now that Goku had departed. She in fact felt precisely the same discomfort that would be experienced by a man with a very large shotgun who turns around to see a very large bear wearing body armor and a top hat staring back at him down the barrel of a bright pink squirt gun.

Videl was convinced that she would have more success trying to coax such a bear into putting its gun down and peacefully surrendering itself to the proper authorities than she would have trying to spend one more second in the Son house without shooting herself in the face. She had made it quite evident to Gohan before she had hiked off into the woods that she would do almost anything to avoid Chi-Chi's current emotional rampage. Videl suspected that Gohan desperately wanted to hide in the woods just as much as she did, but he had committed himself to enduring the forlorn fury of his mother until that fury ended.

Videl chuckled at her husband's perpetual sense of moral duty as she continued to struggle her way through the waist-high weeds to where her daughter was looking at the lake. Actually, she was struggling her way to where her daughter had been looking at the lake; between thoughts of bears and her deranged mother-in-law, Videl had misplaced her daughter.

"Pan!" Videl yelped in sudden realization of the girl's absence. She irksomely scolded herself for being so aloof—she had come out here to enjoy a bit of mental lethargy, but she had wound up thinking about life so hard that she literally lost sight of her daughter. "Pan!"

Videl should have considered that Pan could easily protect herself from the treacheries of the night—even if those treacheries happened to confront her with a fleet of battleships—but she momentarily forgot that her daughter could fly through the air like a bird, could fire bolts of pure energy from her hands, and could lift a tank just as easily as a normal girl could lift a napkin. The dread that her beloved Pan had slipped in the darkness and plunged off of the cliff's edge to meet her untimely death on the rocky shore of the black lake below consequently and furiously mounted within her.

"Stupid weeds!" she hissed. She wanted to run as fast as she could to where Pan had been, but the thick tangle of plants all around posed a formidable barrier. The forest's mighty canopy smothered any helpful overtures of the full moon's light by which a path through the overgrown underbrush could be found. Videl therefore found herself craving a very large flamethrower.

Before she could transform the whole wilderness into a sizzling mound of carbon, she freed her right leg from entanglement in a thorny bush with a sharp jerk and stood at the edge of the cliff on which Pan had been standing just a moment before.

Before her, stretching into the night, were the tacit black waters of the lake. The cool breeze lifted the scents and sense of the placid lake up the two hundred-foot high cliff to her. It was an incredibly refreshing sensation. The beauty of the landscape tantalized her with the full moon and the otherworldly dance of its reflection in the lake. She felt immune from the world, from Chi-Chi, from bears, and from anything else that could be lurking in the woods behind her.

She adored how the phantasmic moonbeams flirted with the high, snow-covered peaks surrounding the serene water and then happily dove down into the dense forest weaving in and out of the valleys. She deeply inhaled the night and elatedly felt her heart pump it throughout her body. Pan, however, was still nowhere to be found.

"Pan!" At first, Videl was just startled that Pan had wandered off into the night. That was the extent of the matter, quite frankly, although her general uneasiness had amplified her reaction into full-blown panic with startling celerity.

"Pan!" Videl's daughter, however, was not responding to the cries of her name. This, Videl was absolutely positive, was bad.

The spooked mother gently ascended into the moonlit air where the moonbeams extended their spectral flirtation to her. As her other senses spasmodically darted about and the tops of the tallest trees tickled her toes, her eyes came to the faint column of smoke rising from the chimney of the Son house, which was a little more than a mile back through the forest. Gohan was there—not very far away at all—and that fact should have made her feel very safe and the whole confounded idiocy of her panic seem laughable, but her imagination and discomfort were conspiring to ransack her cupboard of rational thought. A feral pack of fire-breathing bears could have snatched Pan away to their mountaintop fortress!

Her stomach was jostled about in all sorts of ways by that thought; by the snide glare of the moon; by the derision of the sparkling lake; by the broken, rocky beach reaching up from the base of the cliff like a cozy bed of jagged, rusty knives; and by the playful dance of the bashful waves with the debonair moonbeams.

XXXXXXXXXX

The first rays of morning light were yet to stroke the sky, but the faint glow of the approaching sun was adequate for Gohan to find his way by. This, however, upset him because it meant that he had overslept. In fact, as he glanced down at his watch, anxiety briefly pulsed through his veins: the sun would have Gohan's little slice of the world purged of darkness within a mere handful of minutes.

The poor man did not need this stress. Having spent the entire night consoling his mother—he had escaped the house immediately upon coaxing her into bed—his nerves were already frayed, his mind already soggy with melancholy, and if that weren't enough for one man, he had also worried all night that his poor girls would have a horrible encounter with a mutant bear or some other ridiculously unfortunate terror in the forest.

That was how Gohan had come to live his life though: he knew acutely well that happiness was the rarest of all treasures, that stress and emotional turmoil were far more constant than the rising of the sun, and that, most importantly, one horrible moment in life never precluded the next moment from being infinitely more horrible. Worry, fret, and blatant paranoia had been the cornerstones of Gohan's life for years, and since those three demons had quickly proven to be extremely adept at serving as an unshakable foundation for life's adventures, Gohan had long ago exiled optimism from his thoughts.

That is why Gohan's daily hunt for mental anguish could not possibly conclude with his father's departure from the planet. That is why Gohan could readily and willingly imagine his wife or daughter being imprisoned in the mountaintop fortress of a treacherous pack of fire-breathing bears. That is why Gohan was so anxious about the sunrise—he was going to seize this day from the very start and, for the first time in his adult life, hope that today would be the start of something better.

Gohan was also anxious about the sunrise because he was still a nerd at heart. Just over the horizon, at that very moment, a solar eclipse was approaching totality, and Gohan was manic about the prospect of seeing it. He had never seen a solar eclipse before—this was heedlessly ironic considering the plethora of galactic oddities that he had seen—and he would see it regardless of anything that dared to oppose him.

Time was precious, though, for totality would crumple shortly after sunrise. Gohan was very anxious.

It was much colder under the trees than he had expected, although he really didn't mind; the air had a refreshing chill to it, and his bare feet noticed the kisses of the morning dew on the caressing grass just enough to pleasantly energize him. He was a geyser of glee.

"Oh, if today is as nice as this morning, it will be absolutely wonderful!"

Gohan rounded a bend in the old path—one of many that he and his father had worn through the woods when Gohan was a little boy—and spotted the tent nestled safely among a grove of towering pines. He was only going to check on Videl and Pan because waking them up for the eclipse would cost too much time. Had he liberated himself from the house any earlier, he would have dragged the two girls out of the tent with a tornado of enthusiasm and total disrespect for their guaranteed unwillingness to accompany him.

He continued to allow the stunning magnificence of the morning to invigorate his mind and body, and he continued to sizzle with giddiness at the thought of seeing the solar eclipse. Sunrise was going to be the start of a new day! The excitement of seeing his girls peacefully asleep, as happy as could be, excited him with equal zest, however, so he couldn't resist the temptation to peek in on them. He really had become quite fond of life's special little moments thanks to folks like Cell.

Gohan found himself at the flap leading into the tent. He didn't want to wake them up, but he had to see them, so he very slowly and carefully unzipped the flap, fingers shaking with delicious anticipation. This morning was mind-blowingly awesome!

The tent flap, succumbing to gravity, swung open with remarkable, taunting gentleness and then stood smugly at the entrance while beckoning Gohan to explore the empty recesses of the canvas sanctuary.

"Where are they?" Gohan asked himself with a mild pinch of alarm.

The two sleeping bags were undisturbed; had Videl and Pan not slept in the tent?

Gohan's brain was overtaxed; he could do little more than raise an eyebrow and kick around a few random thoughts.

He calmly turned away from the tent and scanned the area. He was looking for something. He didn't quite know what he was looking for but assured himself that he would know it when he saw it. He saw a lot of trees, the sky, the mountains, the lake, and the ground; but he wasn't looking for those things.

There's no way those two willingly crawled out of bed for a solar eclipse, Gohan amusedly thought.

After a few seconds of standing about idly and not doing much of anything besides staring blankly at nothing, Gohan's brain having coasted to a complete stop, the absence of a campfire slammed into his mind much like a comet, he imagined, colliding with a tub of margarine.

The sleeping bags were undisturbed. There was no sign whatsoever of a campfire.

"Maybe they played an all-night game of aerial tag and ended up sleeping somewhere else. Yep, that's it. Because today is a new day. There is nothing wrong at all, everything is fine, and I am going to finally get to see a solar eclipse!"

The flames of the sun's corona pierced the edge of the world. Gohan was out of time, and since nothing was wrong at all, he would just watch the eclipse from the cliff above the lake. His angels would fly back to him later. He therefore strolled to the cliff with glee.

"Life is fantastic! What a morning! This day is going to be the best thing ever!"

The ethereal ring of solar fire assumed its celestial throne. The supernatural radiance of the blackened star remade the lake into a perfect twin of the regal cosmic spectacle at hand. The angelic sun had been savagely ripped from the new day's sky, and the lake was full of Gohan's tears; the universe's favorite punching bag found himself entranced by perhaps the most nightmarish, disturbing sight that he had ever seen in his doomsday-wracked life: his beloved wife, the guardian of his heartbeat, his precious angel, Videl was staring at him from the other side of creation with soul-haunting, death-haunted eyes that had been raped of life by the salient, sinister rocks that had jostled her stomach about amid the beauty of the night a few hours earlier.

Gohan's heart jumped out to clutch her. His body and mind were abandoned to careen away at an infinite distance in a riotous maelstrom of malevolence dedicated to the universe that he had so diligently dedicated his life to protecting. From somewhere among the festering shards of his humanity that littered existence to forever and back, he watched the demolition of his own soul.

This was the worst thing ever.

The universe was cold, the universe was heartless, the universe was traitorous, and there was nothing that Gohan could do in retaliation. He wished with malice that the universe would immediately die—that it would die the most painful death that the universe could suffer, something far worse in all respects than what he was now suffering, a death that was therefore impossible.

There was no fitting retaliation, not even the complete demolition of the nefarious universe, but it would have to suffice because it was the closest thing to justice that Gohan, a hell-stuffed cauldron of abhorrence, could embrace.

A new day had dawned.


End file.
